Quick Take

Claude Opus 5 (Anthropic) and GPT-5.6 Sol (max) (OpenAI) are prominent models released in July 2026. GPT-5.6 Sol (max) positions itself as the high-performance leader, while Claude Opus 5 focuses on adaptive reasoning and cost-conscious deployment.

Benchmark Read

GPT-5.6 Sol (max) consistently outperforms Claude Opus 5 across all shared metrics. In the Intelligence Index, GPT-5.6 Sol (max) scores 58.9 compared to Claude Opus 5’s 50.6. The gap persists in coding, where GPT-5.6 Sol (max) achieves a 77.4 index score against Claude Opus 5’s 66.9.

Specific benchmark performance further highlights this disparity:

• GPQA: 0.941 (GPT-5.6) vs 0.889 (Claude Opus 5)
• HLE: 0.472 (GPT-5.6) vs 0.413 (Claude Opus 5)
• SciCode: 0.561 (GPT-5.6) vs 0.48 (Claude Opus 5)
• LCR: 0.7366 (GPT-5.6) vs 0.6933 (Claude Opus 5)

GPT-5.6 Sol (max) also provides additional performance data through IFBench (0.7265), TerminalBench Hard (0.6591), and TAU2 (0.8509), which are not available for the Claude model.

Cost and Speed

Financial considerations reveal a clear trade-off. Both models share an identical input cost of $5.00/1M tokens. However, GPT-5.6 Sol (max) is more expensive for output at $30.00/1M tokens, compared to $25.00/1M for Claude Opus 5. Consequently, the blended rate for GPT-5.6 Sol (max) is $11.25/1M, while Claude Opus 5 sits at $10.00/1M.

Performance metrics show a stark contrast in latency and throughput. GPT-5.6 Sol (max) boasts a significantly higher output speed of 73.856 tok/s, but suffers from a very high time-to-first-token of 86.493s. Claude Opus 5 is slower in output at 46.69 tok/s but provides a much faster response initiation at 2.763s.

Best Fit

GPT-5.6 Sol (max) is best suited for complex, compute-heavy tasks where coding accuracy and raw intelligence are paramount. Claude Opus 5 is better suited for applications requiring rapid initial responses and lower long-term operational costs.